This essay was written in 1956. In the years since, “robotics” has indeed entered the English language and is universally used, and I have lived to see roboticists taking the Three Laws very seriously.
The New Teachers
The percentage of older people in the world is increasing and that of younger people decreasing, and this trend will continue if the birthrate should drop and medicine continue to extend the average life span.
In order to keep older people imaginative and creative and to prevent them from becoming an ever-growing drag on a shrinking pool of creative young, I have recommended frequently that our educational system be remodeled and that education be considered a lifelong activity.
But how can this be done? Where will an the teachers come from?
Who says, however, that an teachers must be human beings or even animate?
Suppose that over the next century communications satellites become numerous and more sophisticated than those we’ve placed in space so far. Suppose that in place of radio waves the more capacious laser beam of visible light becomes the chief communications medium.
Under these circumstances, there would be room for many minions of separate channels for voice and picture, and it is easy to imagine every human being on Earth having a particular television wavelength assigned to her or him.
Each person (child, adult, or elderly) can have his own private outlet to which could be attached, at certain desirable periods of time, his or her personal teaching machine. It would be a far more versatile and interactive teaching machine than anything we could put together now, for computer technology will also have advanced in the interval.
We can reasonably hope that the teaching machine will be sufficiently intricate and flexible to be capable of modifying its own program (that is, “learning”) as a result of the student’s input.
In other words, the student will ask questions, answer questions, make statements, offer opinions, and from all of this, the machine will be able to gauge the student well enough to adjust the speed and intensity of its course of instruction and, what’s more, shift it in the direction of the student interest displayed.
We can’t imagine a personal teaching machine to be very big, however. It might resemble a television set in size and appearance. Can so small an object contain enough information to teach the students as much as they want to know, in any direction intellectual curiosity may lead them? No, not if the teaching machine is self-contained-but need it be?
In any civilization with computer science so advanced as to make teaching machines possible, there will surely be thoroughly computerized central libraries. Such libraries may even be interconnected into a single planetary library.
All teaching machines would be plugged into this planetary library and each could then have at its disposal any book, periodical, document, recording, or video cassette encoded there. If the machine has it, the student would have it too, either placed directly on a viewing screen, or reproduced in print-on-paper for more leisurely study.
Of course, human teachers will not be totally eliminated. In some subjects, human interaction is essential-athletics, drama, public speaking, and so on. There is also value, and interest, in groups of students working in a particular field-getting together to discuss and speculate with each other and with human experts, sparking each other to new insights.
After this human interchange they may return, with some relief, to the endlessly knowledgeable, endlessly flexible, and, most of all, endlessly patient machines.
But who will teach the teaching machines?
Surely the students who learn will also teach. Students who learn freely in those fields and activities that interest them are bound to think, speculate, observe, experiment, and, now and then, come up with something of their own that may not have been previously known.
They would transmit that knowledge back to the machines, which will in turn record it (with due credit, presumably) in the planetary library-thus making it available to other teaching machines. All will be put back into the central hopper to serve as a new and higher starting point for those who come after: The teaching machines will thus make it possible for the human species to race forward to heights and in directions now impossible to foresee.
But I am describing only the mechanics of learning. What of the content? What subjects will people study in the age of the teaching machine? I’ll speculate on that in the next essay.
Whatever You Wish
The difficulty in deciding on what the professions of the future would be is that it all depends on the kind of future we choose to have. If we allow our civilization to be destroyed, the only profession of the future will be scrounging for survival, and few will succeed at it.
Suppose, though, that we keep our civilization alive and flourishing and, therefore, that technology continues to advance. It seems logical that the professions of such a future would include computer programming, lunar mining, fusion engineering, space construction, laser communications, neurophysiology, and so on.
I can’t help but think, however, that the advance of computerization and automation is going to wipe out the subwork of humanity-the dull pushing and shoving and punching and clicking and filing and all the other simple and repetitive motions, both physical and mental, that can be done perfectly easily-and better-by machines no more complicated than those we can already build.
In short, the world could be so well run that only a relative handful of human “foremen” would be needed to engage in the various professions and supervisory work necessary to keep the world’s population fed, housed, and cared for.
What about the majority of the human species in this automated future? What about those who don’t have the ability or the desire to work at the professions of the future -or for whom there is no room in those professions? It may be that most people will have nothing to do of what we think of as work nowadays.
This could be a frightening thought. What will people do without work? Won’t they sit around and be bored; or worse, become unstable or even vicious? The saying is that Satan finds mischief still for idle hands to do.
But we judge from the situation that has existed till now, a situation in which people are left to themselves to rot.
Consider that there have been times in history when an aristocracy lived in idleness off the backs of flesh-and-blood machines called slaves or serfs or peasants. When such a situation was combined with a high culture, however, aristocrats used their leisure to become educated in literature, the arts, and philosophy. Such studies were not useful for work, but they occupied the mind, made for interesting conversation and an enjoyable life.
These were the liberal arts, arts for free men who didn’t have to work with their hands. And these were considered higher and more satisfying than the mechanical arts, which were rarely materially useful.
Perhaps, then, the future will see a world aristocracy supported by the only slaves that can humanely serve in such a post-sophisticated machines. And there will be an infinitely newer and broader liberal arts program, taught by the teaching machines, from which each person could choose.
Some might choose computer technology or fusion engineering or lunar mining or any of the professions that would seem vital to the proper functioning of the world. Why not? Such professions, placing demands on human imagination and skill, would be very attractive to many, and there will surely be enough who will be voluntarily drawn to these occupations to fill them adequately.